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Notes -
Following up on the post about assisted suicide, here's more about that Swiss clinic which is the subject of allegations by an Irish family:
Now, I'm not going to argue over the right to die, when is suffering intolerable, religious objections, slippery slopes or the rest of it. What I'm going to do is say that this is a business (indeed, this is a claim made in the story by one of the families). And, just the same way that IVF has become a business, and embryonic selection (see the Herasight proceedings) will become a business, when we get into business territory, it's about profit. And to maximise profits, we reduce costs. If that means setting up a clinic that looks like a blocky industrial estate unit and skimping on postage, so be it.
There's some indication, at least from claims by these families, that procedures are not being followed through, or at the very least, merely rubber-stamped and not, in fact, keeping the promises they made about communication with and informing the families:
The same way that someone in the comments over on ACX described her experiences with IVF and why the clinic downplayed/ignored her problems, it's the same answer here: it's a business now, and profit (not the message about "we'll compassionately give you what you so emotionally desire") is the motivation. And the more it becomes just another business, the more slippage we'll see. No, I don't mean slippery slope, I mean this kind of thing: we don't email you, you have to track your mother's ashes "using a code, like she was a parcel in the post", and hey, verbal promises aren't worth the paper they're written on, we're legal in this country so too bad.
Standards only last as long as the brakes are on. When we take the brakes off, then it's a business and death (and life) is a commodity to be monetised.
I think another comparable industry is trans-medicalism, which is clearly, and documentably associated with profit motivations, and led to an incredible rise of something that was once much much rarer.
much of self_made's response below is a predictable mix of techno-libertarian priors and false assurance against corruption (or simply runaway incentives to overexent) by profit-seeking via ideological purity.
Again, with the case of trans, we can se that was is laughably not the case. We saw the ideological core of trans distort and blind a lot of otherwise obvious ethical, and reputational issues. And we are seeing the backlash now.
Also much like the trans question, we are going to have two movies on one screen interpretation of any rapid rise: A need being met vs creeping pressure and social memeplex.
Self-made's objection is again the same tautology that is used to defend an ever growing number of trans individuals as self-justifying:
If powerful preference is the driving justification, then people with ideological motivations will push their hand on the social memeplex / overton window, even if just to make the existing number with these preferences or marginal preferences more free; it will cost lots of money to do this, and lots of money with be made. And then the number will grow inorganically.
This is exactly how it works.
Most people’s opposition to the trans thing is solely aesthetic, in that it is about pretending that a physical state of being is something other than that it is. It is biologically impossible to go from being a man to a woman or vice versa. Suicide has no such mythos, in fact legalized euthanasia is to some extent about the end of a particular mythology surrounding suicide in which the body belongs not to the man, but to God. It is about cold, hard, material reality.
I find the 'it's just aesthetics' argument to be an empty dodge in these spaces. I understand the intended usage, but it's almost a nonsequitor. Rather, your attempt to distinguish the aesthetics of suicide from trans, kind of makes my point; Because the trans-advocate doesn't see it in your terms.
The point I'm making does not rely on trans and suicide being ontologically similar; only that the nature of the social-legal issue will follow similar social-activitst/profitmaking paths.
You can regard the end result of those paths as of different moral worth based on the object level issue, but the libertarian objections which try to deny that social modulation and profit-making greatly influence these systems, is naiive or lying.
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Not if you have kids.. The consequences go far beyond "solely aesthetic".
I've got a 1 year old.
If a magical pill existed that instantly flipped my daughter's gender to male and then society proceed to see her as a male and she went from quite-likely to commit suicide with 'gender dysphoria' to absolutely cured of 'gender dysphoria' by the pill. I would probably be a little put-off by her taking the hypothetical magical pill when she's an adult, but largely fine.
Alternatively if we existed in an alternate universe where gender was solely defined by what color badge you wore, and everybody was happy to change their perspectives of an individual's gender if they swapped from the blue badge to the red badge. Bit weird, but nothing fundamentally wrong with it.
Unfortunately the current gender-transition thing is an insane death cult that overwhelmingly leads to suicide and invasive surgeries that create a very distant proxy of the target gender appearance.
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